Well, here we are. The weather forecast is reasonably good – “warm and blustery”; we can handle that. The CD is ready. We’re going to Strathardle today. Blogging should resume on Saturday or Sunday.

CD-making proved utterly easy, as is the way with computers. Either utterly easy or all afternoon cursing and swearing because it won’t do the simplest thing.

Alexander gave us the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM a few Christmasses ago – that’s the whole, multi-volumned works. At first, we didn’t have a computer capable of running it with any ease, and when we got this one, it was the first thing I installed. It was sort of awesome to hold that little circle in my hand and think of the many feet of library shelf-space it represented, and the scholarship that produced it.

Similarly, yesterday. Decades of my husband's work and more than a million words, there in the palm of my hand. I made a second copy, and we’ll take it with us today.

Knitting

The edging hasn’t quite reached the end of the bottom edge of the veil – I had hoped to achieve that before we left.

Looking at Kaffe’s pattern book has sort of persuaded me that stripes would be nice (to use my new Rowan yarns in a sweater for Alexander). The trouble is that Kaffe keeps saying, do it at random, and I find random extremely difficult. The only thing to do would be to plot it out in advance. Or, there’s a pattern in Glorious Knitting where he gives a complete sequence for “random” stripes – I could use that.

Non-knit

Swapna and I corresponded yesterday – see Comments – on the Domestic Life of the Elephant, prompted by yesterday’s picture. The topic is at least as far from the subject of her remarkable Blog, as it is from mine.

I got to worrying at Mass – there is nothing like religious observance for setting the mind free to roam – about how a baby elephant suckles. When I got home and looked at the picture again, it seemed as if it might just about be possible, given the slow-slung stomach of Mrs Elephant. But then Swapna gave me a link (in one of yesterday’s comments) to a website with some interesting Facts about the Elephant, and one of them is that a baby elephant suckles with its mouth, not its trunk, which sort of re-opens the question.

In every mammal I’ve ever met, suckling is comforting. Even with cows and horses and sheep and people like that, where both parties are standing up, the baby butts its head into the comfortable warmth of its mother’s flank. How do elephants manage? Does a mother elephant lie down? I need to know more.